The day of Margaret Thatcher's first anniversary in May 1980, six gunmen were holding 22 hostages at the Iranian embassy in London. That night, they made their fifth release but when they killed a man the next day Thatcher approved a rescue by the SAS. Nineteen hostages were saved and five of the gunmen killed.

Their skill "made all of us on all sides of the house proud to be British," Thatcher told MPs. "Judging by the self-satisfaction evident on the government side," wrote Michael White in his sketch, "one might have thought that the final assault in Princes Gate had been made by a group of Tory backbenchers led by you-know-who (dammit, she would have done it, too)".

Later that week, to Scottish Tories, she claimed that there was "a new respect for Britain" abroad, restored by her party. She had spent part of the week before in Luxembourg, rejecting the latest offer from other EEC countries on a budget rebate. "'Madam Non' and the 'She de Gaulle' may make good headlines, but they also make for lousy diplomacy," the Guardian's leader said. Eighty per cent of voters, according to a poll, said she had failed to fulfil her election victory pledge to create harmony.

"Mr James Callaghan, the leader of the opposition, told a May Day rally in Carlisle that 12 months of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister had produced a great revival in the Labour party," the Guardian reported. Callaghan described her first year in office as "an outright disaster" with broken promises on taxation, rising unemployment and inflation and a fall in manufacturing. But Callaghan's optimism was in the last paragraph of a story by Ian Aitken, the paper's political editor, which led on warnings - somewhat more pertinent to Labour's unfolding history - by a pre-SDP David Owen.

Labour had to rethink its ideological roots to match Thatcher and could not afford to scoff at her abandonment of the One Nation tradition in favour of competition and self-interest, Owen argued at another May Day rally.

"We will not combat it by embracing again the bureaucracy of the corporate state ... We cannot deny that the pursuit of a better standard of living for one's own immediate family is a real driving force for most people."

About this article

Resolution of hostage crisis helps Thatcher burnish hardline image

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.01 EDT on Wednesday 25 June 2008.
It was last modified at 19.02 EDT on Wednesday 25 June 2008.
It was first published at 19.02 EDT on Wednesday 25 June 2008.